Munir Ertegun

Munir Ertegun (1883-11 November 1944) was Turkey's ambassador to the United States from 1934 to 1944, succeeding Ahmet Muhtar Mollaoglu and preceding Huseyin Ragip Baydur.

Biography
Munir Ertegun was born in 1883 in Istanbul, Turkey, to civil servant Mehmet Cemil Bey and Ayse Hamide Hanim, the daughter of a Sufi sheikh. Ertegun graduated from Istanbul University in 1908 with a law degree and served as a legal counsel for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during World War I. Ertegun chose to join Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's National Struggle against the Ottoman Empire, betraying the Ottomans, who had originally sent him to negotiate with Ataturk. He became an aide of his during the Turkish War of Independence, and he served as a legal counsel to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which allowed for Turkey to become an independent nation. He served as the ambassador to multiple nations in the 1930s, and his longest assignment was ambassador to the United States, an office that he held for ten years. He died in Washington DC on 11 November 1944 at the age of 61, and because there was no mosque where he could be buried, the Islamic Center of Washington began construction after his death and was completed in 1957.